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Boll's two sons — Scott, 10, left, and Kyle, 12, shown with their dog, Zeke — are eager to move into their new residence, a transitional home set up by the church.

For more information on Winterset’s Hope Home, call (515) 462-3261 or go to hopehomewinterset.org.

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WINTERSET, IA. — Panhandlers don’t blanket the courthouse steps in this picturesque, rural tourist town of 5,000. The more typical random encounter is, say, a sightseer with a backpack and thick Australian accent on his way to visit one of the county’s six historic covered bridges.

Who knows what Winterset’s famous son, the late movie icon John Wayne, might think if a homeless camp sprouted in the shadow of his 7½-foot-tall bronze statue looming atop a pedestal along John Wayne Drive? Or beneath one of the wooden bridges?

The Duke has been dead for 34 years and even he still has his own house here — the four-room birthplace preserved at the corner of South Second and East South streets.

Homelessness is an invisible affliction to much of Winterset and Madison County, yet it does exist. A new push by the local First United Presbyterian Church congregation is reminding its neighbors of that much.

Monday, Dawn Boll and her two sons will move into Winterset’s newly christened “Hope Home,” a cozy ranch house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on the southwest corner of town. It’s designed as a transitional home — a stable refuge for about a year while the family who dwells there regroups through active collaboration with the congregation and others in the community.

Boll, 33, wept last month when she answered the phone and was told that she and her boys had been chosen after a rigorous application and interview process.

“She cried and cried,” said Donna Vaughan, the woman who was on the other end of the phone — and who sat across from Boll and other candidate families she interviewed for Hope Home. “And I cried and cried.”

Boll’s younger son, Scott, happened to turn 10 the day of the news. So that afternoon, she pulled into the Hope Home driveway with her son in the car and said, “Happy birthday!”

“I like it,” was how Scott summed up his new home last week as he sat with his mom and 12-year-old brother, Kyle, amid the boxes in their current apartment across town. He was hot and tired after football practice. “I get the room right next to Mom’s.”

This single, unemployed mom had fallen behind on rent, and she and her kids were on the way to eviction.

Hope Home is a 1,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house built in 1982 that has been cleaned, repainted and carpeted in recent weeks by church volunteers. It all started less than a year ago as the congregation mulled $160,000 worth of bequests that had been languishing in the bank.

“Are we going to be very, very ultraprudent, or are we going to do something with this?” Vaughan said was the framework of discussions.

There was a “feeling that we ought to be doing something with (the money) and not just filling up a bank account,” said Pastor Jim Howland.

It was during a meeting last November when Vaughan spoke in vague terms about a homeless shelter. That’s when local family practice physician Kevin de Regnier piped up, “Well, let me tell you this idea. …”

That brainstorming session set the congregation on the path to Hope Home.

“Our goal isn’t just to put somebody in a house and have them sit there,” said de Regnier, lauded as a driving force. “It’s to help them develop the skills that they need to be successful on their own.”

Plans were fleshed out, and the congregation (about 120 on the church rolls and 70 regular Sunday worshippers) voted overwhelmingly in favor of pushing ahead with the project.

The house was purchased in May for $95,000, with $17,000 down. (The sluggish real estate market of recent years gave the church a lot of shopping options.)

Vaughan then spearheaded a “client care team” of seven that pulled in local education and social services experts from beyond the church. They met weekly for a couple of months and sifted through about 10 applicants, winnowed down to three families to interview.

“We had a lot of tears in the interviews from all of us,” Vaughan said.

This was not the neat and tidy dramatic arc of reality TV. This was real life — neighbor facing neighbor. Vaughan felt emotionally drained by the process, yet also marveled at the resiliency of the three single moms she never had met.

Hope Home so far has been met with a chorus of support from local residents, social services workers and officials. But the support has been tinged with curiosity — or apprehension, even from within the congregation itself — to see exactly how this experiment will turn out.

A shelter for domestic abuse victims is available 20 miles north in Adel. But the nearest homeless shelters, local social workers say, are situated in Des Moines.

Such a one-home, one-family mission is rare for a small community but not without precedent, even in Iowa.

Statistics based on those who sought help show there were more than 16,000 homeless Iowans in 2012 — with the actual figure likely much larger.

Experts also say that about one-third of the state’s homeless population tends to cluster in Polk County, where more resources exist.

St. Theresa of the Child Jesus Catholic Church purchased its own transitional home in 2001 in Des Moines as it struggled to arrange housing for a refugee family of 10 from Sudan. About seven families have since cycled through its home, remaining for up to two years.

An initial one-year deadline “just wasn’t long enough for a family to get things turned around,” said Anne Dols, St. Theresa’s pastoral care minister.

Winterset’s Hope Home trailblazers devised a 24-item list of rules for its resident families — prioritized according to “high seriousness” and “medium seriousness.” (Violation of the former results in swift eviction. The latter triggers a four-step warning system.)

Boll speaks candidly about her troubled past — which impressed Vaughan and others in her interview — but also is wary about being the center of attention.

She looks forward to working with members of the congregation to learn how to budget.

Boll grew up in Winterset and graduated from high school in 1998. Then she fell into the throes of methamphetamine addiction and at one point stole checks from her parents and cashed them to buy more drugs.

She has been clean and sober since emerging from inpatient treatment in Cedar Rapids in March 2005. She has shuffled through a series of apartments with her children. Her criminal record has made it all the harder to find steady employment in a small town.

Boll’s parents live hours away in eastern Iowa, and she has no contact with her sons’ father or her own brother. She and the boys once did spend a month sleeping on a friend’s living room floor.

The family’s cost burden includes Kyle’s prescription medication to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Buying gas to drive to appointments with her son’s allergist and psychiatrist in Des Moines has been a challenge.

Of course, such stories are nothing new to local experts on the front lines of trying to help precarious families week after week.

Anne Withers is county director for MATURA, a community action center whose mission is to help improve the self-sufficiency and quality of life of families within the region of Madison, Adams, Taylor, Union, Ringgold and Adair counties.

She helped four local families arrange emergency housing in August and expects a seasonal spike as the cold of winter approaches.

“It is not a quick fix, and it’s a lot of paperwork,” she said of her procedure of funneling financial assistance to the families, who must then find their own housing.

MATURA’s aid can include deposit plus rent for two or three months, while a companion “Friendship Fund” drawn from local church donations provides a family up to $300 within any 15-month period for emergency medical supplies or transportation.

Families struggling to pay simple rent and utilities qualify as the top problem among Withers’ client base.

“It’s going to be one of them learn-as-you-go” situations, she said of Hope Home, thankful to see it sprout in her town.

Last week, Vaughan was busy baking house-shaped cookies with white frosting for an open house and blessing today at Hope Home, before the Bolls move in.

Scott is eager for new bedsheets emblazoned with the logo of his beloved Green Bay Packers.

Boll’s long-term goal is to enroll in school to become a certified nursing assistant — which probably will require driving to classes in Des Moines or Creston.

“Taking care of people is my passion,” she said.

It’s good to remember that Boll doesn’t enter the Hope Home as some two-dimensional statistic in a desperate hour of need. She enters with her own set of dreams intact.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson @dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).